Construction Theme E-Learning Template Design

Last week’s E-Learning challenge asked course designers to share course starter templates for the construction and building industry. Examples include content slides, quizzes, interactions, photo layouts, and more! You can view some of the submissions in the recap, but I’m sharing here about my submission.

After looking at some of the submissions, I felt I should create something that is a little more subtle with the construction theme. In some instances, you may want to use a design that simply has a construction “feel” to it, but doesn’t need to have the industry props and bold “construction colors”. When I first considered the challenge, I thought I may want to use a “sketch” or drawings theme, which I still may explore later. But what really stood out to me were the many materials used in construction and that’s when I decided to use steel as my inspiration for my design template.

Having just upgraded to Articulate 360, I wanted to explore using the features of Storyline 360 or Rise, to familiarize myself with these applications. I started a new course in Rise first, and couldn’t immediately see options for much customization, so I decided to go with Storyline 360 instead. I have much more to learn in Rise, so I’ll save that for another project and/or challenge.

I gathered some assets to use (backgrounds, textures, graphics, font, etc) and started a new project. I begin by editing the Master slide with the background and font I want to use in my layouts.

Next, I determined what layouts I wanted my slides to be (one of the challenge requirements was to include at least six slides). I chose to create slide layouts for Title, Objectives, Section Title, List Layout, Infographic, and Tabs Interaction.

For these challenges, it is only necessary to use placeholder images and text, which saves a great amount of time if you are creating something new. One great feature of Storyline 360 is the content library, which makes searching for and inserting assets (photos, characters, illustrations, etc.) quite simple. Another time-saver is to use the random text generator. If you are new to Storyline, or don’t know this trick, it is easy to insert sample text by using the =rand(p,s) or =lorem(p,s) function, where p equals the number of paragraphs of sample text and s is the number of sentences in each paragraph of sample text. So then the formula =rand(3,4) would generate three paragraphs of sample text with 4 sentences in each.